


The Care And Feeding Of Chuck Noblet, or Ways To Cheer Up Jaime

by soupytwist



Category: Strangers With Candy
Genre: Domesticity, Illness, M/M, Ridiculousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-11-05
Updated: 2006-11-05
Packaged: 2017-10-09 10:16:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/86163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soupytwist/pseuds/soupytwist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"Geoffrey, I'm dying!" did not have the anticipated response: Geoffrey hung up on him.</i></p><p>Written as cheer-up fic, because what ill people need is Chuck Noblet freaking out over being eaten by his non-existent pet dog.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Care And Feeding Of Chuck Noblet, or Ways To Cheer Up Jaime

**Author's Note:**

> For snoopypez. Everything - including the Dead Or Alive X-Treme Beach Volleyball - can be blamed on her. *g*

When Chuck came down with the flu, he resigned himself to a week spent staggering from the bed to the kitchen to heat up soup. Claire had taken Seamus on a trip ("What do you mean - we just took that vacation to the men's spa centre." "Actually, Chuck, this is less a break _with_ you, and more a break _from_ you.") and Geoffrey was not currently speaking to him, due to some unfortunate comments Chuck had made about Geoffrey's multi-media collage of Johnny Depp, which really _had_ looked like a slightly malformed lemon, whatever Geoffrey said.

On the first day, it was OK. Not fun, but bearable. He heated up some E-Z Cheez 'n' Tomato soup from the store of ready meals he always kept in the top right hand cupboard for times when he had to feed himself, told Oprah in no uncertain terms where she was going wrong in between sneezing fits, and fell asleep in front of some kind of art documentary on Michaelangelo, which absolutely didn't remind him of Geoffrey in any way at all.

The second day, he woke up shivering and didn't stop, even with three hot water bottles and two American flag blankets. He felt too ill to make soup, and even Dr Phil, who he usually really enjoyed for 1.having less hair than Chuck and 2. making an excellent fake debate partner, just gave him a headache. He stayed in bed and huddled under the covers, dozing fitfully, until it got later in the evening and he woke up enough to panic about being found dead eaten by the (non-existent) pet dog.

Geoffrey had said not to call him unless the art classroom was actually going to explode, but Chuck decided his imminent demise totally counted, and called him anyway.

"Geoffrey, I'm dying!" did not have the anticipated response: Geoffrey hung up on him. However, five minutes later he called back with "You aren't _actually_ dying, are you?", and fifteen minutes after _that_, Geoffrey was letting himself in the front door with the key Chuck had pretended to accidentally leave at his house one time.

Geoffrey took one look around the bedroom and declared that Chuck absolutely couldn't stay there a moment longer. ("You're not staying in a room with a picture of a dog playing poker, Chuck, that's just sick. I keep telling you that thing's going to give you malaria.") Somehow, Chuck ended up drinking some nutritional drink supplement thing on the couch in the living room. It tasted kind of foul, but he managed the whole thing before falling asleep under the cheerful patriotic warmth of his blankets listening to Geoffrey telling him about the evils of abstract expressionism.

The third day Chuck didn't notice anything much. He was too busy being feverish enough that nothing much made any sense, and all he remembered afterwards was being led upstairs to a bed that magically had all-fresh linen, smelling just right and clean and cool under his hot cheek.

Sometime on the fourth day, Chuck woke up and found that he had not, in fact, imagined the whole thing. Geoffrey was on the bed next to him, passed out cold in his clothes. Geoffrey looked really ridiculous with his hair plastered every which way, and his mouth was open at a really unattractive angle, which Chuck hadn't actually thought was possible until now. He magnanimously decided not to wake Geoffrey up to tell him so; somehow he didn't want to, and so he plodded to the bathroom instead. The cold white tiles were kind of soothing, and he felt better enough after going to the toilet and downing two glasses of water to go and get some bread from the kitchen.

The bread turned out to be stale and nasty, so he went for a Pop-Tart instead (plain strawberry, not double-chocolate with frosting, in deference to his weakened state as the mighty warrior brought down by a great foe). He nibbled it cautiously, and when no immediate relapse occurred, toddled off back upstairs to eat it in bed. Geoffrey stirred as he opened the door, blinked at him, and gave him the kind of huge sleepy smile that Chuck could never stop himself smiling back at. He got back into bed, suddenly realising that he couldn't remember how he got into the blue striped pyjamas but as sure he didn't want to think about it as he was sure he didn't want to think about the strange light feeling in his chest either.

"You aren't going to be amputated!" murmured Geoffrey happily into Chuck's elbow. Chuck immediately added 'whatever the hell Geoffrey's been obsessing about all this time' to his list of Things He Wasn't Thinking About.

"Nope," he agreed, and they spent the rest of the day dozing, eating yet more soup (Geoffrey's was substantially worse than Claire's, but was, however, Chuck's favourite flavour, so he only complained for one minute rather than his usual four) and watching bad television. Oprah was definitely better with somebody to appreciate his explainations of her wrongness, even though Geoffrey didn't seem to think so, and then there was some sort of design challenge show which Geoffrey enjoyed objecting to, apparently mostly on the grounds that he wasn't on it. Geoffrey also, it turned out, liked Saved By The Bell, and refused to go to the store for medicine while it was on. ("It's so-I-don't-die medicine!" "Priorities, Chuck - Zack takes his shirt off this episode!") He did make herbal tea afterwards, though, and even some apple pie from one of the packets in the freezer, despite managing to destroy two and nearly blow up the microwave before getting something edible. Then they curled up in bed again and watched the Food Network before falling asleep, Chuck's head on Geoffrey's shoulder.

On day five, Chuck woke up feeling overheated, but this time it was because Geofrey was doing his usual turn as the human blanket. It was oddly reassuring, so Chuck kicked him in the shin until he rolled over to his own side of the bed.

This lasted approximately five minutes, at which point Geoffrey rolled straight back and in the process made Chuck realise that he was feeling better in other ways, too, and those ways liked the whole 'Geoffrey being in bed' idea quite a lot. Geoffrey also moved in his sleep a _lot_, which was totally unfair. Chuck felt completely justified in answering Geoffrey's sleepy "Better?" with "Claire isn't back until Saturday." Especially when Geoffrey suddenly looked a lot more awake and said "So we have three whole days?" with the sort of look on his face that usually involved the locker room showers, a supply closet or, on one memorable occasion, the small group of trees at the bottom of the sports field.

The rest of the day - and the two following - were mostly spent in bed. They ordered pizza and Geoffrey scared the delivery boy by asking where he got his uniform from. ("Geoffrey, I am not dressing up like a pizza delivery boy!" "Of course not - I thought _I_ could dress up like a pizza delivery boy." "Oh, okay.") They also took a break to commandeer the X-Box that Chuck had bought himself for Seamus' last birthday, and Chuck absolutely did not mentally do a dance when he trounced Geoffrey at Dead Or Alive X-Treme Beach Volleyball. Then they had some more sex, and napped a lot, and the light feeling in Chuck's chest increased to the point where he looked up his symptoms on WebMD in case he actually did have ebola or something. When, for the first time ever, WebMD failed to tell him he had some kind of fatal disease, he decided it was maybe pretty OK. Geoffrey seemed to agree.

On the evening of the eighth day, he was coming up with particularly erudite and believable answers to Claire's queries about why all the bed linen had been washed and now smelt of flowers and where the picture of the dog playing poker had gone when the phone rang.

"Chuck, I'm dying!"

Chuck swore.


End file.
